This is the lane that goes through St. Mary’s between Stanyan and Shrader:

Click to expand

The owner of the white Hyundai (CA 6HOT660) resides in the Chinatown / Nob Hill area, one might assume.

And here’s one of the cars that driver Jose Jimenez hit on Clayton near Fell Street when he was traveling from the hit and run scene to St. Mary’s. This two-ton minivan was pushed a foot or two so the impact speed must have been fairly high:

Of course it’s only been two decades since the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, so it’s only natural that we’re still working on it. Let’s check out progress on California’s Bridge to Nowhere So Far.

That’s Treasure Island you can see ‘neath the Bay Bridge’s northern cable, and there’s Azkaban in the background. Click to expand:

Let’s say you’re the driver, perhaps in a first person shooter video game or whatever, what do you do here? SFPD Richmond Station Captain Richard Corriea has his troops fired up about traffic safety, so this could be another sting operation using an undercover babushka lady or pink bag mafiosa as bait. Therefore, you gots to yield to let her across. But what happens then?

Click to expand, it’s fun to play along:

What happens then is that inbound traffic in the slow lane (seen on the right) doesn’t stop. Zing, zing, zing they go past. Unseen is the Steven Fowler-type behind you in a BMW (it’s always a BMW, which model does Fowler probably have by the way, M5, M3, X5? something like that) laying on his horn because you, the idiot driver ahead of him, doesn’t know how to drive.

Should you go forward as well? That’s a failure to yield moving violation right there, but by waiting for her are you encouraging her to do something dangerous, like crossing the damn street in the Richmond, the biggest danger, by far, in her life?

On it goes for half a minute, the pedestrian waits for the three-series behind you to catapult launch around you up the slow lane and then the ped makes it across.

This is insanity. Shouldn’t this be an electronically-controlled intersection with traffic lights instead of just a couple of stop signs for cross traffic? Why aren’t there traffic lights and countdown pedestrain signals for the whole of Geary Boulevard in the Richmond all the way up to Avenue 30 or 40 or something?

Money? We can’t afford it? Geary Boulevard is too wide and too busy for this kind of half-assed, a couple of stop signs are good enough, we’ll repaint those crosswalk lines when we feel like it attitude.